In David Farrell's and Marissa Anderson's small but newly renovated kitchen, there is a sandwich bag of plastic fragments taped to the fridge. Financial adviser Gail Vaz-Oxlade has run the couple's credit cards through a blender.

It's probably not very good for the blender, but it makes a nice image for the TV cameras: Farrell and Anderson were spending double their combined income of $150,000, treating themselves to spa weekends and routinely picking up the restaurant tab for family parties. Vaz-Oxlade, who calculated they would run up $1.3-million in debt by 2013, has ridden to their rescue with her financial makeover show Til Debt Do Us Part.

"You and I do not have to go to dinner and spend $75 to have fun. We can eat a peanut-butter sandwich and go for a walk in the park," Vaz-Oxlade observes in an interview before she heads over to Farrell's and Anderson's house for a final visit. "It's about the experience of being together ... We are substituting acquiring, spending and getting, for connectedness."

By the end of the final shoot in the living room of their modest Etobicoke bungalow, the couple are hugging Vaz-Oxlade. And well they should be. She has put them on a strict cash-only weekly budget - you can see the money jars on their kitchen window sill, including $125 for groceries and a mere $25 for entertainment - and rewarded their successful efforts to get back on track with two baskets of gourmet food for entertaining at home and a $5,000 cheque to pay down debt.

That cheque is the grand prize on Til Debt Do Us Part, which launches its fourth season next week on Slice. Over the course of a month, Vaz-Oxlade drops in several times to analyze the problem, plan a budget and assign challenges that force the indebted to acknowledge the emotional reasons for their overspending. She has sent a couple to partners' yoga because she thought their relationship, in which the husband was hiding consumer debt from his wife, lacked equality. To help them distinguish needs from wants, she has told a doting grandmother and her spoiled granddaughter to pack a box with everything the girl would need in the event their house was swept away by a hurricane. She has also sent one couple over a cliff blindfolded to learn to trust each other, forced another to lug around their TV sets as symbols of their debt and routinely demands that her subjects get a second job to pay the bills.

"I don't give a crap what people spend their money on. I don't care if you want to spend all your money eating out, it's your money," said Vaz-Oxlade, an outspoken 48-year-old who immigrated here from Jamaica in 1977. "But you can't spend money you haven't made yet."

It's straight talk and tough love that Vaz-Oxlade brings to these feckless families and they usually respond with tears, laughs and thanks. Occasionally, they fight back, however, clinging to their old ways and only winning a thousand or two as a final payout. That grandmother, for example, never did get the message: A pink fairy dress was about to be packed into the carton of necessities before the child burst into tears and the exercise was abandoned.

Of course, it's extreme behaviour that makes good reality TV and Vaz-Oxlade is full of horror stories, like that of a couple who were putting their mortgage payments on a line of credit, or the one who used cash advances from one credit card to make the minimum payment on another. But many sensible people have been caught up in the consumer bonanza of easy credit too: The last time Statistics Canada asked, in 2001, almost half of Canadians were spending more than their pre-tax income, while the national savings rate for 2007 was at its lowest since 1988. In a television landscape filled with makeover shows that throw money at largely frivolous problems such as drab living rooms or failed fashion sense, part of Til Debt's appeal is that it offers advice many of us could really use.

"People are accessing way more credit than they ever should be able to access," Vaz-Oxlade said. "If interest rates go up at all, there are a lot people who are going to be badly hurt."

She knows from experience that many people don't really understand the hard reality of compounding interest: Her couples are always shocked when she unveils the million-dollar debts they are going to rack up with a few more years spending. And she routinely has to explain to people who are using credit to pay debts that means they have made no payment at all. She has even heard banks telling customers never to make more than the minimum payment on a credit card so they build a good credit rating. She'll do the math and figure out what that credit rating will actually cost you.

There's a nice irony there: Vaz-Oxlade actually got into the business of financial advice by helping banks sell their products and services to customers. Working first as a clerical assistant and then as a salesperson with a company that sold human-resources training programs, she wound up writing the booklets that taught staff at Royal Trust and CIBC about products such as RRSPs, mortgages and loans. It was a great way to learn about money, and she went on to build a career as a business journalist, writing financial-advice columns for various Canadian publications, including this one, and publishing several books in the field.

She attributes her fearless approach, however, to motherhood. "I got my big personality after the kids were born," said Vaz-Oxlade, who has a 14-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son with autism. "I wasn't afraid any more. I knew who I was because I was their mother." Learning how to raise her autistic son, in particular, showed her how an amateur can become an expert in any field, and honed her ability to read body language, she says. Now she applies those special listening skills to struggling grown-ups.

"Clients say 'Gail, please come and make us do this,' " she said, laughing. "You know what I am? I am a virtual mummy."